QUOTE: Originally posted by Katwriter

LOL....Oh look who's back! [:p]

I wonder what the "jkr" stands for in your screen name.

You truly are a sick individual. You really should seek some help.


If your 'detective' work ever pans out, you'll see that you were the aggressor in this whole thing anyway. If you'd like me to stop posting on public boards, you could always ask.

I'm just stopping by to say 'hi'. I see you and yours are still getting along wonderfully with others. Maybe I'll pop by the big party on Friday. Sounds like a real hoot.

Sorry for interrupting the argument, please continue.

QUOTE: Originally posted by LeeAnnSontheimerMurphy

Somehow I think that perhaps Factuality might be including me among the "regulars" here on the Forum who lack any knowledge worth sharing. Even if I'm wrong about that, I have something to say.

I've become really, really weary of the word wars, the egos, and the sales pitches from various sites. I'm tired of the game playing and the one-upmanship.

When I post here I hope to offer something of what I've learned in more than twenty years as a freelance writer - not two decades of closet writing or playing a writer game - but twenty years of credits, publications, and paychecks.

I'm not here to sell books or services from my website. I don't make an official announcement each time I have a new byline or clip. I don't need to - I established myself as a writer long ago.

Although writing books may be of assistance in honing the craft of writing, it is no substitute for experience or work. I've read a great deal about truck driving. I've known quite a few truck drivers and former drivers including my husband. And, while I could adequately write about driving a eighteen wheeled truck, I couldn't drive one down the highway. That' s something I would have to learn how to do by doing it.

The same would hold true for many areas. Reading medical self-help guides doesn't make me an accomplished physician nor does perusing cookbooks make anyone an excellent cook. Hands on experience does.

Rather than expend any more effort in further honest attempts to share information with others or offer advice to posed questions, I'll be writing. I may join in a few discussions but I won't offer any tangible information.

I'll put that energy where it should be - in my writing. Watch for my byline coming to a publication near you.




I can only say that before I did learn to drive a big rig I had to read about it first, and it helped tremendously. I still had to drive the thing to do the real learning, but knowing how everything worked before I got in made it ten times easier. And I could, in fact, do just about everything the first time I climbed behind the wheel because I had read the book. The main things I had to learn by doing was how long it takes to stop a loaded truck, and how wide the turns are going to be. But since the book had warned me of these things, I was ready for the problems.

Of fthe top of my head, I can't think of a single profession that doesn't begin with books. I'm sure there are some, but not many. Certainly every profession taught in college begins with books, and so do nearly all those that are taught in technical school.

No, reading books doesn't make you a physician, but if there's a physician out there who started practicing his trade before he'd read a great many books on the suvbject, I sure don't want him as my family doctor. And the best cooks I've ever known use cookbooks each and every day. Cooking may be a great example, in fact. Why on earth would you want to try learning the resipe for a cake all on your own when you have only to open a cookbook and quickly learn from someone else's experience, saving yourself endless failures before you get it right.

Read and writing are the important things, but not reading the how-to books and magazines wityhout doubt makes the road a heck of a lot harder to travel. I can't even imagine how you'd know what a transition is, or what the various forms of POV are, or what an inverted pyramid is, or what a hundred other things are unless you read it somewhere.

Reading and writing are the grit, but just as a physician isn't going to start cutting open an abdomen without having read some books first, and just as a cook has to be taught by someone, a writer has to learn somewhere, and while I suppose it's possible to learn how to write well just by reading and writing, I wouldn't want to hold my breath until until you learned all that's needed by this process.

It is possible to tell which writers have done their homework and which haven't, and the comparisons are usually pretty striking.

As an editor, I can't even tink how I would talk to a writer about rewrting something like a novel unless that writer had read enough how-to books and magazines, or learned teh equivalent in good writing classes where books will also be assigned, to know what I'm talking about.

How-to books and magazines aren't supposed to substitue for the work itself, but they can and do make the work a heck of a lot easier to learn, and save editors a lot of headaches they shouldn't have.